THE CRITICS - - I ' ,--y 1111 I I I (' l' I . )- TT]J - 1 - T 11 . I, .. , +----+f I J L' I I I II ' .-. -- BOOKS EXTENDED PERFORMANCE Saving the Republic of Aburiria. BY JOHN UPDIKE T he Kenyan novelist, playwright, journalist, and academic Ngugi wa Thiong' 0 has written provocatively, in his book of essays "Penpoints, Gun- points, and Dreams" (1998), about "1: " 1 h . perlormance -not mere y t eatrl- cal action, as in the performance of a play, but "any action that assumes an audience during the actualization." He cited in illustration the exercise of political power, which involves "vari- ations on the performance theme." A 1999 interview with Charles Canta- lupo, a Penn State professor, elicited this elaboration: "So much in society depends on 'perfor- mance.' It provides new insights into certain behaviors. It is central to so many things. For example, you can't have religion without performance: performance, weekly, daily. . . . Performance enables people to negotiate their way through the various realms of being. Performance is a means for people to realize their unknown, even if it's only in the imagination. Performance is a very impor- tant concept. I have learned from it, but also I have been involved in it." In his crowded career and eventful life, N gugi has enacted, for all to see, the par- adigmatic trials and quandaries of a con- temporary African writer, caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents. Born in 1938 in the village ofKamiri- ithu, just north of Nairobi, in the so- called "white highlands" of colonial Kenya, Ngugi was the fifth child of the third of his father's four wives; his father was a peasant farmer compelled to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Ngugi attended 74 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 31, 2006 mission-run and independent Gikuyu schools. He read Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. He was for a time a de- vout Christian, and at the age of twenty- three married his first wife, Nyambura, who was to bear six of his eventual nine children. In 1963, he received a bache- lor's degree in English from Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, and for a time practiced journalism in Nairobi. The previous year, his first play, "The Black Hermit," had been produced in Kampala. In 1964, he left for England to pursue graduate studies at Leeds Uni- versity; the same year, he published, under the name James Ngugi, "Weep Not, Child," his first novel and among the first to be published in English by a black East African. "The River Be- tween" (1965) and the classic "A Grain of Wheat" (1967) followed. Their suc- cess did not deter him, however, from questioning the importance granted in Kenyan education to the colonial lan- guage. At Leeds, with revelatory effect, he had read Marx, Fanon, and the Ca- ribbean George Lamming, whom he credited with composing "the first novel that painted a picture of myself in Af- rica." In 1968, he wrote, with two oth- ers, an article entitled "On the Abolition of the English Department," asking, "If there is need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture,' why can't this be Mrican?" Ngugi made headlines when, in 1969, he changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and when, in late 1977, Daniel arap Moi, then Kenyà s Vice- President, ordered him to be detained in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison without charges or a trial. His offense had been involvement with a commu- nity theatre in his home village, and his co-authorship, with Ngugi wa Mirii, of a play in the Gikuyu language, "Ngaa- hika Ndeendà' ("I Will Marry When I Want"). The play was banned; the the- atre in Kamiriithu was razed. When the playwright emerged from prison, he an- nounced that henceforth he would write in Gikuyu. His association with the theatre, he has explained, was a "homecoming: the only language I could use was my own." Prior to this decision, according to Maya J aggi' s profile in the Guardian, he had thought he must stop writing; "I knew about whom I was writing, but not for whom." His first novel in Gikuyu, "Caitaani Mutharaba-ini" ("Devil on the Cross"), of1980, was written in prison, on toilet paper. His last novel in English, "Petals of Blood" (1977), furiously tackled, from a leftist angle, contemporary cor- ruption in Kenya and its government. Upon his release from prison, he was not reinstated in his position at Nairobi University, and in 1982 he left Kenya for London. His exile eventually took him to California, where he is a profes- sor of English and comparative litera- ture at the Irvine campus of the Univer- sity of California, and the head of its International Center for Writing and Translation; his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, directs the faculty and staff counselling center there. Ngugi had vowed never to return to Kenya as long as Moi, who had become the President, and his Kanu Party were in power; both were ousted in the elec- tions of December, 2002, and in 2004 Ngugi returned, with Njeeri, to launch the first volume of "Murogi wa Ka- gogo," a thousand-page novel that he had been writing since 1997. Met by a crowd of well-wishers and press at Nai- robi Airport, the author announced that he wanted to be "in touch with the ev- eryday." Two weeks later, the everyday in Kenya arrived with a vengeance when the couple were attacked by four men in their high-security apartment complex. Ngugi was beaten and his face burned with cigarettes; in another room, Njeeri æ:: was sexually assaulted. Jewelry, a laptop, 9